A Wood Sculpture and Lessons in

Wu Wei and Wabi Sabi

Ernie Stech

Walking recently along a national forest trail, I noticed several weathered sticks laying on the ground. As I continued, I saw more. Picking up one of the pieces, ten or so inches long, it occurred to me that with several more I could fashion a representation of a mesa. Noticing turned into gathering. I ended up with a collection of five: one quite long, one a bit shorter, and three much shorter. I could visualize the longest as the base of the mesa and the others progressively shorter to represent sloping sides.

At home a few weeks later and with nothing else to do, I sat down outdoors with my mesa materials and placed them as I had imagined. Not a mesa. A mess. The lengths were about right, but they did not fit in a neat stack. There were large gaps. The mesa did not emerge as planned. Recognizing failure, I put the sticks aside and went on with my life.

It did occur to me that I could shave and sand my sticks to make them fit. That did not appear reasonable. Then I remembered something I had read years before in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Robert Pirsig wrote about muscle traps in mechanical work. The specific example was a nut rusted on a bolt. There was a great temptation to get a bigger wrench and apply more force. Unfortunately, that probably would result in shearing the bolt. The solution was not to apply more force but to apply more thought. The result? Squirt some oil on the nut and bolt. Then tap the nut to allow the oil to penetrate the threads. It took some patience. But eventually the nut rotated off the bolt.

The principle, I learned years after reading the book, is from Taoism. In the Tao Te Ching it is labelled wu wei. The naïve translation is “doing nothing.” A deeper assessment shows that the intent is to avoid forced action. Tao is conceived of as a flow in the universe. Any action that goes against the flow is potentially ineffective or even dangerous. Wu wei implies unforced action.

Shaping my sticks to fit the mesa would be forced action. The alternative was to take the elements and play. Try different combinations. See which of them naturally fit into another. I did this. Within half an hour I had an arrangement of five pieces of natural wood that nested together. The result was not a representation of a mesa but a natural design produced from five randomly collected natural elements. They required no modification.

There was an additional lesson. An important value in Taoism is humility. A design that is inherent in materials develops from facilitation and not from the brain or soul of the creator. It is difficult to take great pride in a form that essentially created itself.

The wood sculpture design is not beautiful by western standards. More likely described as awkward. Awkward beauty. The very definition of the Japanese design style known as wabi sabi. Objects and settings in the natural world are imperfect, random, rough, asymmetrical, and unique. Nothing in nature is perfect, orderly, new, smooth, symmetrical, and standard. Those are the human traits imposed by designers and makers and what we want to buy in a store.

I was and am quite satisfied my wood sculpture. Beautiful or not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson